Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sniped at Republican hawks on Wednesday, urging Americans to ignore the neocons that pushed American troops into Iraq and the “biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the country.”

Reid’s torrid speech about “out-of-step” Republicans came just five hours before he and other congressional leaders are heading to the White House to meet with President Barack Obama on Iraq, heightening the intense partisanship between Republicans pressing for intervention in the Middle Eastern country.

The Nevada Democrat singled out on the Senate floor the neoconservative “architects” of American intervention in Iraq, lambasting by name former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and columnist Bill Kristol.

He also blasted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for on Tuesday critiquing the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq as a predictor of what will happen when the U.S. leaves Afghanistan later this year. McConnell did not respond in his subsequent floor speech.

“After all these years, their suggestions haven’t changed. They are in a time warp. Those who are the so-called experts are so eager to commit American soldiers to another war. Why is their advice so valuable?” Reid said. “To the architects of the Iraq war who are now so eager to offer their expert analysis, I say … ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ Unfortunately, we have already tried it your way and it was the biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the country.”

Reid’s remarks represent the Democratic cringe at hearing from the same voices on Iraq that were loudest last decade — though the Senate leader focused more on Cheney, Wolfowitz and Kristol than his Senate colleagues Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). The latter two have volubly criticized Obama’s Iraq policy.

Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, a former Senate candidate, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday evening to describe Obama as “determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch” and “willfully blind” to the effects of his foreign policy on the world.

“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is ‘ending’ the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — as though wishing made it so,” they wrote.

Reid did not mince words in his response, describing Wolfowitz’s critiques of Obama’s Iraq policy as “bizarre” and clarifying that he was talking about “Billy” Kristol the writer, “not the comedian” Billy Crystal. But he saved his strongest broadside for the Cheneys.

“If there is one thing that this country does not need, it’s that we should be taking advice from Dick Cheney on wars. Being on the wrong side of Dick Cheney is to be on the right side of history,” Reid said.